The Black Queer Sexuality Studies Collective Presents
Legacies of Black Feminisms: A Black Queer Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Conference
Location: Princeton University
Date: October 11, 2014

 

What is the status of the black feminist tradition in the academy today? More urgently, how should we understand the black feminist tradition in relationship to queer and sexuality studies? How might we reconcile the animating influence of black feminist scholarship in the humanities with its marginalized position in the academy? If we accept that black feminist interventions of the 1980s and beyond radically revisioned strategies, methodologies, and approaches of intellectual engagement, how do we understand its near disappearance only forty years later?

 

If, as Roderick Ferguson argues in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, women of color feminism—black lesbian feminism, particularly—emerged at the end of the “second apotheosis of liberalism,” as the foremost site from which to combat and orient opposition in an increasingly shrinking world, what role does the black feminist tradition play today as neoliberalism everywhere entrenches itself?
How might Jasbir Puar’s call to supplement intersectionality—a term and methodology borne out of the experiences and intellectual work of black feminists—offer a response to the black feminist tradition’s position in the neoliberal moment or how might it challenge it? In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar urges scholars to conceptually rethink intersectionality alongside assemblages.
This conference invites papers that consider the convergences and divergences between black feminisms and queer theory. Our theme, purposefully broad, aims to include a range of disciplines including but not limited to, history, sociology, literary and cultural studies, black studies, queer studies, media studies, and art history. We especially seek scholarship from disciplines where a lacuna exists with regard to queer experiences and/or those of people of African descent. Sample topics include but are not limited to:

• Black feminism and globalization
• The role of black feminist archives and genealogies
• Intersections between political organizing and intellectual production
• Black feminism and the digital age

 

Salamishah Tillet, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will deliver the keynote address for this one-day conference. The conference will feature 16 presentations of original scholarship. Submission and acceptance to this conference will be based on blind reviews of 250-300 word abstracts. Please submit your abstracts and CV to bqsgraduateconference@gmail.com by September, 10 2014. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. All other inquiries should be directed to Brittney Edmonds (bedmonds@princeton.edu).